Show and Tell: The Shapes of Stories
Show and Tell: The Shapes of Stories
A newsletter that breaks down the visual construction of imagery.
Do you remember when you were a child, and you would demand that your parents tell you stories? I know I did that. Appa or amma would tell me a story, usually after extracting the promise that I would try to sleep as I listened. I promised, but rarely tried to sleep. When they finished, their voices softening with awful hope, I would be silent for a little while, toying with them. Just as they started to creep away, I would pipe up, “Tell it again”. And they did.
I don’t remember those stories in detail, but what I remember is their rhythm. There were good and evil characters. The evil would oppress the good. The good would rise up in righteous anger. There would be a conflict, in which after some suffering, the good would triumph. The same narrative inevitability extended from the stories I was told to the ones I read back then, from Rapunzel to the Ramayana, to the Famous Five. I bought into the messaging of those stories wholesale. I believed I was good, and therefore, those who weren’t like me must be bad. It seemed so simple.
I wonder if we are still those children, demanding endless repetitions of the same familiar stories. We say we like novelty, but that isn’t necessarily true. In times of stress, what we crave is the comfort of familiarity. The stories we’ve been told over and over are the ones we cling to, long after they have been proven to be inadequate.
The shapes of stories
Kurt Vonnegut has a delightful talk that I regularly revisit on YouTube. In it, he talks about how you would draw a story. He plots them in a two-dimensional space: ill to good fortune on the y-axis, and time on the x-axis. As the story progresses, fortunes waver, providing narrative tension. They usually end either at the height of good fortune or in the depths of despair.
The philosopher Crispin Sartwell takes this further. In 2017, he wrote in the New York Times about the shape of history. He wondered how we would draw it. Would it be the arc of the moral universe, bending towards justice, in a rising arrow? Would it be a singularity, exploding in all possible directions from a single point? Would it be a loop that we are trapped in, or a spiral, progressing ever so slightly more than each time we regressed?
I wonder what stories we’d tell if we made the shapes first, then fit the stories to them.
Stories and images
I know this newsletter is about imagery, but one of the things I try to do here is to sand away at the boundaries between words and images. Stories aren’t just words printed in a book. A photograph of a man brandishing a Confederate flag in the US Capitol is a story. So is the image of a father pleading for the authorities to return his son’s body for burial. As is the image of a farmer cowering under the blows of a security man. Yet, we read them differently, based on the stories we have already been told. Based on the shapes of the stories we inhabit. On when those stories began, and how we think they will end.
Image, gesture, touch, cadence, words, all these are ways in which we communicate.
A storyteller uses them all to different degrees. Few confine themselves to a single medium. Even a novel uses a font and a layout. The turn of a page – gesture and sound – contributes to the experience of reading it. In a modern world that is inundated with streams of images, video, words, emoticons and ideas, the communication quickly gets overwhelming. When that happens, we default to the familiar stories we know and inhabit.
Multitudes of stories
In her now viral TED talk, the author Chimamanda Adichie talks about the danger of a single story. When we have only one story through which to describe a people or a country or culture, we limit our imagination of them. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes, Adichie argues, “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.” If we only know one story, cling to it and repeat it till it becomes the only thing we believe, we lose sight of the humanity of people. Of the fact that others are inhabiting stories different than ours.
Another point Adichie makes – while citing the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti – is about how it matters where the story begins. “Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story.” Start the story of India with the ideals of secularism and not the failures of secularism, and you have an entirely different story.
When stories collide
What happens when stories collide? When the story I’m living intersects with yours? You become a character in my story, I become one in yours. But our stories work differently. Maybe I see characters as only good or evil, and you see them as neither. There is a dissonance, because you do not behave like I expect you to, because you are following the logic of your story, not mine. Do we alter our stories then, or our selves?
Perhaps the way to reconcile this is to muddle up time and space. We tend to think of stories having beginnings and endings, but perhaps they don’t. Perhaps they occupy space-time in ways that are not familiar and linear like Vonnegut’s axes. I like Terry Pratchett’s description of stories as “great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, [that] have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time.”
What if we see ourselves as living simultaneously in not one story but in many? Stories with indeterminate beginnings, with some resolution but rarely any endings, ribbons of space-time that collide with one another to branch off into new, uncoiling threads of their own. Then, maybe, we can gather these threads together and understand them in all their complexity, for a little while.
Maybe we could teach our children all this when we tell them stories. Tell them as they fall asleep and hope they are listening.
Here are some things I’ve read in the past few weeks that I thought you might like too:
Why rioters wear costumes.
Repaired clothes are the height of luxury.
A photograph of a fist pump that will be remembered.
I thoroughly enjoyed the sets and costumes on Bridgerton and appreciate the care and storytelling that went into them.
Akshi Chawla’s #WomenLead newsletter has a fascinating collection of Swiss posters arguing for and against giving women the vote. They were given that right just fifty years ago.
If you liked this newsletter, why not share it?
I’m trying to get up my engagement and subscriber numbers, folks. Not so that this can then disappear behind a paywall: I enjoy having as large an audience as possible and that I don’t have to commit to churning out a piece on schedule, so the newsletter will be free for a while yet. But I need those growing numbers to justify the time and effort I put into this newsletter, so do like, comment, share and subscribe?